Julian Barnes Quotes (19 Quotes)

I just read the new novel by Jay McInerney, who is a friend of mine. And I did so with great apprehension, because it takes place around the time of those attacks. But I thought he handled it beautifully, since he comes at it from a bit of a side angle.

I think he had a quite sort of ambiguous relationship to Holmes. It made him rich, it made him famous, but as often the case with these things, a writer can turn against his or her most successful creation hence, he killed him off (in 'The Adventure of the Final Problem') and brought him back by popular request. And, of course, people did sort of confuse them and assume if he could invent these complicated mysteries, then he could also solve them.

People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves

Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He invests it, bombards it, mines it, assaults it - and each time the smoke clears, the castle is as solid as ever.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

I was also interested in the racial side of it. Even today, the Chief of the London Metropolitan Police is trying to make the force more representative of London and there's a lot of resistance from the predominantly white force.

The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature only then can he see clearly

It's the great drama, the great unknowable of most of our lives, ... We don't all paddle up the Amazon in a canoe and get shot at, but we do the equivalent of that (in our relationships).

Those were the days in this country where H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Conan Doyle could have influence, and that's gone, that's true. But I don't think we have less influence in the hearts and minds of readers. I think, if anything, we have just as much, if not more.

The writer's life is full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life.

I did read Sherlock Holmes as a boy but I never thought for a moment that I'd ever write about Doyle,

I briefly considered writing it as a non-fiction book but the fact of the matter is that George left few traces,

You grew old first not in your own eyes,but in other people's eyesslowly,you agreed with their opinion of you.

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.

Talking It Over' is the only one of my books people asked me what happened next, ... And they disagreed about what happened when the book concluded.

As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page of the papers.

He came attached to the case. ... I didn't know much about his biography before I started, and I hadn't read him since I was 20, I suppose. But in the process of research and writing, I found him to be a very admirable and a moral and warmhearted person.

But I think you could make it truer by making it up. In a way when people say it could have been non-fiction, that is gratifying because I've convinced them and they can't tell the bits I've made up from the bits I didn't make up.

Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't.